But in
fact Sand was arguing a fairly banal truism: there is no
such thing as a unified, national “Jewish people.” As a
globalized religious community (due to proselytizing before
the rise to power of Christianity in the fourth century)
there are instead multiple different Jewish communities
across the world.

A Jew
from Yemen would have no distinctive secular points of
reference in common with a Jew from France, Russia or
Poland. For example: before Zionist reinvention from the end
of the 19th century, Hebrew was a purely liturgical
language. Jews from different countries naturally spoke in
local languages.

That
book was a fascinating journey through centuries of Jewish
history, much of it swept under the carpet by Zionist
historiography. Sand’s new book, The Invention of the
Land of Israel, is essentially a direct sequel,
focusing on the nature of an idea central to
Zionism:
the “Land of Israel” — Eretz Israel in Hebrew.

Sand
explains that in Israel, “in the Hebrew-language edition of
foreign books, the word ‘Palestine’ is systematically
replaced with the words Eretz Israel … Even when
the writings of important Zionist figures such as Theodor
Herzl, Max Nordau, Ber Borochov and many others [who also
used ‘Palestine’] … are translated into Hebrew” (23).

Holy
land or homeland?

In the
Hebrew Bible (known to Christians as the Old Testament), the
geographic area roughly corresponding to the land of
Palestine (between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean
Sea) is mostly called the “land of Canaan.” The area “never
served as a homeland for the ‘children of Israel,’ and for
this reason, among others, they never refer to it as ‘the
Land of Israel.’” Most Israelis, Sand argues, are not aware
that the term is not found in the the Hebrew Bible “in its
inclusive meaning” of a wide geographic area (86).

Later
Jewish religious law “does feature the debut of the term
‘Land of Israel’ ” but, Sand explains, this was a “holy
land” rather than a “homeland” (102). Most Jews did not seek
to live there. Philo of Alexandria, a first century Jewish
philosopher, lived in
Egypt
— right next to Palestine. He could have moved to
Jerusalem, since both regions were under Roman rule —
but instead, like most people, he chose to live and die in
his original homeland (96).

Furthermore this Eretz Israel was traditionally
considered by mainstream
Judaism
to be so holy the devout were positively forbidden to move
there (183). Even pilgrimage was a rare, and later
phenomenon. Between the years 134 and 1099, “we know of no
attempts by the followers of rabbinical Judaism to make
pilgrimages to the holy city” of Jerusalem (123).

All
this stands in stark contrast to the 1948 Israeli
Declaration of Independence which claims that “the Jewish
people … never ceased to pray and hope for their return.” In
contrast to this “mythos,” Sand writes: “most of the world’s
Jews … did not regard Palestine as their land … they did not
strive ‘in every successive generation to reestablish
themselves in their ancient homeland’ ” (175).

Ever-shifting borders

“Settlement Zionism, which borrowed the term ‘Land of
Israel’ from the Talmud, was not overly pleased with the
borders it had been assigned by Jewish law … extending only
from Acre
to
Ashkelon … [it was] not sufficiently contiguous to serve
as a national homeland,” argues Sand (214).

He
then reviews the history of the ever-shifting definition in
Zionist thought of where exactly its “Land of Israel” is —
something undeclared till this day.

Early
Zionists drew on God’s promise in the book of Genesis to
give the mythical patriarch Abram’s children “this land,
from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the river
Euphrates” in modern day
Iraq.

In
1897, the same year as the first Zionist congress, Israel
Belkind (“the first practical Zionist”) drew a map: “ ‘The
Jordan splits the Land of Israel in two different sections,’
asserted Belkind, whose assessment was subsequently adopted
by most [Zionist] settlers of the period” (216).

For
the future first prime minister of Israel David
Ben Gurion, these borders “were too expansive and
untenable, while the borders of the Talmudic commandment
were too narrow.” In 1918 he gave his own take: “In the
north — the Litani River, between Tyre and Sidon [in
Lebanon] … In the east — the Syrian Desert. The eastern
border of the Land of Israel should not be precisely
demarcated … the Land’s eastern borders will be diverted
eastwards, and the area of the Land of Israel will expand”
(217).

Not
for nothing were the borders of the new state unmentioned in
its declaration of independence (233).

Incendiary

Ben
Gurion later scaled back this conception, but even
mainstream Labor Zionist figure as Yigal Allon would still
at times refer to the whole of historic Palestine as the
“western Land of Israel” as late as 1979 (237).

There’s also a brilliant chapter on the origins of
Christian Zionism in the protestantism of
nineteenth-century British imperialists.

Sand
stops short of calling for implementing the
right of return for Palestinian refugees. His concluding
chapter is a history of al-Sheikh Muwannis, the Palestinian
village that Israel ethnically cleansed in 1948 and in place
of which his own university now stands. Unfortunately, he
counterposes removing the university, on the one hand, with
the Palestinian refugees never being able to return en
masse, on the other — as if those are the only two
options (280).

It’s a
useful book for debunking Zionist myths, which, due to the
legacy of Protestant Christian Zionism in the west are
surprisingly resilient. But as Sand’s slightly flaky
post-Zionist politics demonstrates, a more realistic
knowledge of history doesn’t necessarily translate fully to
a rights-based understanding of the Palestinian plight.

Still,
there is much to enjoy and learn in the evidence in the
potentially incendiary material he assembles here.

Asa Winstanley is an associate editor with The Electronic
Intifada, and a journalist in London who has also worked in
Palestine.

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